Day: 21 June 2011

Tomcat, WebSockets, HTML5, jWebSockets, JSR-340, JSON and more

On my recent excursion into non-blocking servers I came across Comet, server push technologies and then Web Sockets. I was late arriving at the Comet party, but I think I have arrived at the Web Sockets party just in time. The final standard is still being evovled and at the time of writing, the only browser supporting it by default is Chrome. So to get started, I had a look at what was around. Initially, I wasn't going to write a blog article about it, I just wanted to learn about this new thing. My only requirement was that the server implementation was Java based. The reason is simple - my entire technology stack is based on Java EE and I want to be able to integrate all my existing stuff into any new server, without the need for an integration bus. I like being able to drop a JAR file from one project into another one and to be up and running immediately. So I had a quick look at jWebSockets, Grizzly (Glassfish), Jetty and Caucho's Resin. All similar, yet all somewhat different. Most different, was jWebSockets, because they have gone to the extent of building their own server, instead of basing their solution on an existing server. I had a good long rant about that kind of thing when I blogged about node.js, so I won't start again. But jWebSockets has a real issue to face in the coming years. JSR-340 talks about support for web technologies based…

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